Business Directories

Busy CEOs losing millions on emails, meetings

Dubai, May 29, 2014

Top executives lose thousands of hours each year responding to email and sitting in unproductive meetings, and the losses snowball through their organizations – simply because companies do not track and monitor employee time as tightly as any other resource, such as capital, said a study.

About 15 per cent of an organization’s collective time is spent in meetings, a number that has increased steadily since 2008. One company’s weekly senior leadership meeting directly consumed 7,000 hours per year for the attendees – but 300,000 hours companywide among subordinates in preparation and related meetings, according to the new Bain & Company study.

Yet most companies have no ability to quantify how their executives and other employees spend their time because they do not track and measure it, the company stated.

Bain has studied how lost time costs millions each year and has compiled a list of best practices companies can follow to fight time management’s “Eight Deadly Sins.”

The company teamed up with VoloMetrix, an enterprise analytics company, to examine the time budgets of 17 large corporations and came up with these key findings:

•Executives today on average receive 30,000 external communications per year, up from 1,000 in the 1970s. At the current rate, executives will soon spend more than one day each week managing electronic communications.

•Senior executives on average devote more than two days each week to meetings with three or more co-workers. A meeting that starts just five minutes late costs a company eight per cent of that meeting – a loss that would be untenable in any other resource category.

•Meetings are often scheduled “just because,” and dysfunctional meeting behaviour is on the rise. At one company, about one in five meeting participants sent an average of three or more emails for every 30 minutes of meeting time. At a sample 10,000-employee business, $60 million – 20 per cent of the total cost of meetings – was squandered in unproductive activity.

Bain’s work with large organizations has found the problem to be cultural as much as systemic: Organizations evolve into complex mechanisms that require increasing maintenance to function smoothly, and a corporate culture springs up to support this effort, siphoning resources away from externally-focused, customer-serving tasks.

“Most time management advice focuses on individual actions – be choosy with meetings, rein in your email box. But this advice sometimes goes against your company’s culture: Ignore emails and meeting invitations and you risk alienating your colleagues – or your boss,” remarked Michael Mankins, leader of Bain’s Organization Practice in the Americas, who led the survey and report.

“Innovative companies are fostering cultures where time is treated as a scarce resource and invested as prudently as capital,” he added.

Dr Yasar Jarrar, a partner at Bain & Company Middle East, said the region's corporate arena continues to remain vibrant and aggressive. "However, at some point, it still finds itself losing a lot of money in lost time," he stated.

Many will surely agree that this can be attributed to factors like traffic, tardiness in appointments, long unproductive meetings and discussions of unessential agendas, said the study by Bain.

"With this in mind, we are confident that many businesses in the Middle East will learn a lot from our latest research on time management. Utilizing their recommended zero-based time budget strategy will surely help in avoiding the risk of losing more money, while at the same time drive in more productivity and improved efficiencies in their operations," stated Dr Jarrar.

Bain’s research highlights these eight deadly time management sins and their cures:

•Muddled companywide agendas: Make them clear and selective so all know how to use extra time and what tasks can be shelved with penalty.

•“Time is free” approach to scheduling: Create zero-based time budget and manage organizational time as rigorously as capital assets.

•“Let’s start a project” mindset: Require a business case for any new project.

•Thickening middle: Simplify the organization. More managers and layers robs time and creates more work for others.

•ACS – “Anyone Can Schedule”: Create a line of authority for who can call and set meetings.

•Decision-making or decision-murky? Manage decision-making – not the matrix for it – by standardizing the process.